Marketo Summit 2016: The Best 5 Writeups

ByIdan Carmeli

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17 May, 2016

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Last week marked Marketo's annual summit, which this year took place in Las Vegas. Here are our favorite five summit write-ups by show attendees.

When it comes to annual events, you can trust the top marketing tech brands to throw the best ones. After all, events like these represent the pinnacle of marketing's raison d'etre, right? Last week's Marketo Summit in Las Vegas was no exception. With keynotes by mountaineer Alison Levine, actor and producer Will Smith, and of course Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez, as well as a rich agenda of informative sessions - there was a whole lot to digest for marketing automation enthusiasts.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what we are. So without further ado, here are the top five write-ups we enjoyed reading since last week about the summit.

What Happens in Vegas Makes it to my Annual Writeup
/ Maneeza AminyFull of emotion, with focus on the keynotes and takeways. We loved it because the excitement was catching.Best quote: "[on using Account Based Everything to orchestrate experiences] I tell my folks that your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. (Best definition I picked up somewhere). What do you want people to know or experience with you? In fact, what do we all want people to know and experience with us? I think we should write it down and then measure ourselves against it."

10 Thing we Didn't Learn at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit
/ SocedoA clever take by Socedo on their learnings from the summit.Best quote: "Customer success, onboarding and sales can all benefit from marketing automation. Jamie Gutfreund, CMO of Wunderman, stressed in her keynote that each generation of buyers has an increasingly high expectation of brands. It’s no longer enough to use personalization; brands must achieve individualization. This can only happen when the entire customer journey is aligned."

Marketo has been communicating this architectural change to its customers worldwide since August of 2016, yet only lately it has become clearer that the change will affect more than a few fields. Specifically this is true for Marketo customers whose Salesforce CRM edition is the Professional edition.

Tip: if you're unsure which edition your Salesforce org is running on, log in to your account there and simply hover the cursor on the browser tab where Salesforce loaded. The tab tooltip will show you the edition.

If you're not a Salesforce Pro user, you can stop reading here; the change won't affect you beyond the 16 fields that you were asked by Marketo to recreate in Salesforce (see here
, Marketo login required).

It's hard to overstate the degree to which Marketo's Email Editor 2.0 has improved on the previous generation. In fact, it has become, in one fell swoop, the most powerful email editor in the marketing automation space - and we know quite a few of them very well.

One of its most striking features is the use of variables to expose many aspects of email design and functionality to the editor's user interface, enabling users to quickly and easily manipulate their email's elements, without resorting to source code edits or fighting the whims of the rich text editor.

To fully benefit from this feature, though, it's important to understand the two types of variables available to you: global and local. Mastering them and configuring your templates accordingly can greatly improve your (or your users') email editing experience in Marketo.

One of the key functions of any marketing operations role, or system, is to ensure the proper handling of new leads. Depending on your business process implementation, this may involve any combination of the following sub-procedures: